Jim Dowd @ The Gloucester Claim claims otherwise there’s a pattern:
The most recent attacker, Christopher Harper-Mercer, follows the strict pattern of highly-aggrieved men trapped in a cultural paradox from which they cannot escape. His and the other attacks like it, congruent down to sporting military-style clothing, are an attempt to call “society” to task for leaving them behind. To these men, who perceive they are not receiving the level of respect to which they feel deeply entitled, it’s nothing less than a revolution. When you read their posts online they discuss previous attackers like the Dylan Klebold of the Columbine massacre and James Holmes of the Aurora theatre shooting and now Harper-Mercer as a martyr, a hero and most disturbingly, a “warrior” for the cause.
Dowd goes on to note that the Internet has allowed this subgroup to begin to link up and begin defining a rationalizing doctrine involving White Supremacy (my comments on supremacies of any color here), men’s rights movements, etc. Jim continues:
So why is this happening in the United States? For similar reasons it happens anywhere else in the world. These young men feel humiliated and powerless. They find themselves incapable of achieving the status they perceive necessary to secure what they want most, typically access to sexual partners (and let’s not forget that suicide attackers in the Islamic tradition are awarded 72 virgins in paradise). They then attack the people who they think are responsible for their standing, typically at a school or a workplace where their daily perceived humiliations are carried out.
Is this so hard to understand? Just like in other countries where there is extreme change and social tension, the formerly empowered group being pushed “out” is fighting back with violence. We continue to perceive these mass shootings to be individual, isolated incidents. They are not. They are like car bombings and transit attacks overseas, individual incidents but linked to a greater struggle.
Yes, it is for those of us who didn’t fall into violence of this sort. Most folks are not aware of subtle societal trends over time; it’s hard enough just to consume everything we’re expected to consume.
“Humiliation” is the word you see again and again. That’s the engine driving this, the never-ending loss of face of volatile young men.
Today a growing segment of young adult males will not achieve the material and social success necessary to be attractive mates and form households. By way of comparison, a generation ago in his mid-20s my father had a house, a wife, two kids and a stable job things I was unable to achieve until my ’30s (he would go on to fuck all this up later, but that’s another story). Today Increased economic opportunity and higher educational attainment for women has removed the economic need to be tied down to undesirable dudes. This is a good thing for almost everyone. But for those on the outside, however, it turns social awkwardness and the tail end of the achievement bell curve into a prison planet of isolation. And that generates rage.
I would not confuse this with blaming society, since that implies a deliberate attempt to humiliate the young men in general. It would be interesting to decompose this a bit more. For example, they are proud, yet humiliated. OK, what achievements generate pride for them? Or are they being raised to be proud without reason? (Yeah, the whole pride thing could be usefully examined, as people take way too much pride in the silliest of things – and then kill each other over it.) But as manufacturing moved overseas, it’s certainly true that there are fewer jobs available to young guys. Another trend is the zero-risk society, which removes many jobs or replaces the workers with robots. I had a reaction to that a few months ago:
My reaction when reading about AI is mixed: an interest in the technique, but a real feeling of WHY? This planet positively crawls with nearly 8 billion people, most of them fairly smart and capable of doing the same work asked of an AI based program, in most cases much better.
It’s a grim, even repulsive thought, but also undeniable: young guys put themselves at risk. Period. In prior generations they were sent off to war, the coal mines, the farm fields, where they worked off their energy while their brains caught up with their bodies.
It’s an interesting blog post by Mr. Dowd, especially the bit where he quotes some of the fairly horrific posts by those who appreciate the Oregon slaughter.
(Updated 10/9/2015 to fix inadvertent reversal of what I mean to write. If, indeed, I’m not just a random writing machine. That does militate against predestination, though.)
